ATEOTT 10 Transcript EPISODE 10

ATEOTT 10 Transcript

EPISODE 10

[0:00:04.2] JK: It was the most grassroots thing you could possibly imagine. I was there at the freaking 7-Eleven putting up posters, they get ripped down. Go back the next day, put them up. I was on the radio station every morning at 8 a.m. I mean, this is KTKE, which is where the radio was in the back of a barbecue joint.

I was there trying to explain, yeah, yoga, music, nature. I got at least that simple. Yoga, music, nature. You get that? People are like, “Huh? What? Yoga and music and nature? I don’t get it.” I did that for 50 days or something. Then the night Michael Franti, who was our headliner, and the night before his headlining show, first year of festival, burst his appendix.

[INTRO]

[0:01:02.4] LW: Hey, friends. Welcome back to the At The End Of The Tunnel Podcast. In this episode, you’re going to hear from someone who began his journey in the music industry. Through an unlikely series of events, one being having an office just a few blocks away from the former World Trade Center in New York in September of 2001, that experience led him to become one of the first to bridge the gap between yoga, wellness and music.

His name is Jeff Krasno. You may have heard of the worldwide movement that he started many years ago called Wanderlust. Well, Jeff is going to take us through that journey as well as how it evolved into his more recent movement, which is called One Commune. Just a heads up, our interview is just a little bit longer than usual, because Jeff is such an amazing storyteller.

As I was listening to his story, I found it to be such a relevant example of how pretty much all of the so-called random events that we experience in life, stuff like getting bullied as a child, to being a pothead as a young adult, to making and selling homemade guacamole at random bluegrass festivals. These kinds of moments when we look at them in hindsight are almost always contributing something along our path that we're going to eventually use later on to be of service in some unexpected way. Jeff's story just kept going to all of these remarkable

Without further ado, I'm excited to introduce you to the venerable, Mr. Jeff Krasno.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:51.6] LW: Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. As always, I'd like to start these conversations by talking about childhood. The question that we'll kick it off with is can you recall what your favorite toy or activity was as a child?

[0:03:15.5] JK: Well, I was super into Batman. I was living overseas most of my childhood. When I was in Brazil, I think it was Bachiman. Yeah, I would dress up as Batman. I've one younger brother, he wasn't born yet at that point, so it was just me and my parent. We moved around a tremendous amount. We moved, I think 11 times before I was seven or eight. That was a very diverse cultural peripatetic youth all over Europe and then in South America and Brazil mostly, moving around to a bunch of different places in Rio.

Yeah, that's the most coherent memory I have. Then I think that there was another cartoon character called Speed Racer. I was really into that too. My father worked for the Ford Foundation in Rio. The Ford Foundation was responsible for bringing Sesame Street to Latin America. That was one of his jobs, to bring Grover and Big Bird and Kermit and that cast of characters to South America, have those things. Originally translated into Portuguese and to Spanish, but then they became localized themselves and they were producing down there. That was a fun experience.

[0:04:53.2] LW: If I could talk to little six or seven-year-old Jeff, what would he say was so appealing about Batman? Why Batman?

[0:05:03.7] JK: Yeah. I mean, that's a fine question. I think that there's got to be a superpower component to it that Batman was not confined to the same rules and regulations of the normal human condition. I also think that he got to dress up in this fantastic outfit and wear a cape and wear a mask. That was the other thing, when I look back, there's a whole series of photos of

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 2 ATEOTT 10 Transcript me as a young kid, both in Spain and in Brazil, dressed up as a torero, this matador outfit, where I had the whole outfit and the hat and the cape. I think there was a dress-up component to it that seemed pretty appealing at that.

[0:06:00.5] LW: I'm sure the car didn't help – I mean, didn't hurt either, right? The Batmobile.

[0:06:04.6] JK: The Batmobile. Yeah. I had a lot of those cars. That was a big thing, that whole –it was Tyco or whatever, had all of those trucks and cars. I had a lot of those. I'd like to smash them up quite a bit as I suppose a typical young boy is apt to do.

[0:06:40.7] LW: Tell me a little bit about the moving around. What was that about? I know you said your dad worked for the Ford Foundation. It sounds like you were a child of the world. I know you speak French now. I don't know if that's something you learned back in those days. Or what was your childhood like in terms of your family dynamic and whatever that was causing you guys to move around?

[0:07:00.1] JK: Yeah. The French, I actually learned later in life when Schuyler and I, we moved to Paris mid-college. Certainly, the neuroplasticity, I think had – or the rivers in my brain that I think made me fairly adept at picking up languages was developed when I was a kid. My dad was a Fulbright professor, so he was essentially getting grant to teach psychology first at the University of London and then in Spain. We moved to a little town called Santiago de Compostela which is a beautiful old town. Just I guess to rewind, I was born in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day at the Lying-in Hospital, which was at the University of Chicago.

[0:07:54.8] LW: That's where I was born.

[0:07:56.6] JK: No, really?

[0:07:57.6] LW: Yeah. Yeah. Three years later.

[0:08:01.1] JK: That’s hilarious. Yeah, my parents grew up in Chicago, just outside of Chicago. They both went to Evanston Township High School and were high school sweethearts. They got married really young, as was the custom back in that day. They were finishing at Stanford,

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 3 ATEOTT 10 Transcript so then we moved to Palo Alto and then we moved overseas. My dad was teaching, got the Fulbright grant to go to University of London. We actually moved up to the Lake District in northern England, which was very, very rural.

We rented this kooky amazing property that was property of the queen. I think everything up there in some way was property of the queen. It was bucolic in the sense of the reality was go outside and pick blackberries and come in and make jam. I was really into cement mixers and working around the property. There's a ton of photos of me like, every photo of me has a shovel. I was just love the shovel. I had a little tiny miniature horse called Maybe. Just because I couldn't name it. People were throwing different suggestions to me and my response was always, “Maybe.” It just became Maybe. Then yeah, moving to Spain and then Brazil. It was wonderful from the standpoint of opening me up as a child to other cultures, certainly other languages.

[0:09:48.5] LW: You were fluent in Spanish and fluent in Portuguese?

[0:09:51.5] JK: Yeah. I at a really pretty young age. Part of it is certainly, the supple, absorbent mind of a young person tends to soak in language quickly. I think that there was another piece of foot, which is that as a kid, I just wanted to fit in. That was the difficult part is that we were bouncing from location to location. I'd have to quickly sponge in fluency around a new language, start a new school and then six months later, would be in another place.

[0:10:34.0] LW: Do you remember finding that exciting? Or do you feel that was a hassle and you didn't look forward to it as a kid?

[0:10:40.7] JK: Well, it was I suppose exciting, although I didn't really know any better at that juncture. I think that was what I just thought life was about. You just tagged along with your parents. I was also a chubby kid, significantly chubby. When we moved to Rio, I had some difficult there, just because I was five or six-years-old, I had a paunch belly that would hang over the belt of my jeans. My thighs would chafe enough to create some thread bareness on the denim. I was teased quite a bit. There are a couple of incidents that stick out that I remember quite clearly.

[0:11:34.6] LW: Can you talk about those?

[0:11:36.8] JK: Yeah. Yeah, I can. I went to the American school in Rio and Gávea, which is a lovely part of Rio. I think I was five or six. There was a school bully, a playground bully named Babito. Of course, it's central casting, right? The mix, the student mix at the American school was a smattering of foreign nationals, Americans, but mostly Brazilians, mostly Brazilian families that one of the kids speak English.

The classroom itself, the linguistic currency was English, but the playground was strictly Portuguese and a very particular slangy Portuguese known as Carioca, which is native to Rio itself. There was this this playground slang and camaraderie that existed really amongst the Brazilian kids. There was one ritual on the playground that most all the kids partook in some way, but I assiduously avoided it.

There was a sloped area of the playground. This ritual would be the kids would run along the grass as they came upon the slope, they'd hurdle themselves forward and land on their butts and skid down this hill, to the point that after time, there was a dirt rough landing strip developed over time just from youth. Babito was the main conductor, orchestrator of this ritual. He'd get everyone queued up and whatnot. I was always off to the side, because my physique did not lend itself well to hurling myself down the hill. It was not accustomed to that nimble, dexterous movement.

One particular day, I summoned enough confidence to get in the line and just tentatively approach the hill and launch myself forward and land on my butt. I wasn't going to set any distance records, but I managed to get down the hill with a couple of cheers of, “Americano!” I trudged back up the hill, now brimming with a little bit more confidence and queued back up and tightened my belt a notch and pulled my polo down for my belly. This time with more verve, made the approach, but launched myself forward, landed and then heard this sound that echoed, that stopped all other phenomena. It's amazing how the brain can process sound into material reality very quickly.

I immediately knew that I had ripped my jeans down my ass crack all the way. What’s more, I as was the custom back then and you probably backed me up is that there wasn't boxer briefs,

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 5 ATEOTT 10 Transcript or anything. I had tighty whities. That's what you wore. There's nothing else. I had ripped my pants to such a degree that my tighty whities now had taken up a deep brown thing from the dirt landing strip. Of course, this sent our good friend Babito into paroxysms of joy and laughter.

He started a playground-wide refrain, the American shot his pants, which echoed over and over. I stood there at the bottom of the hill with deep embarrassment and self-loathing and biting my lip, eyes welled, not trying not to burst into tears. Immediately into fight-or-flight mode, or in this case, trying to angle myself most appropriately, so to limit the availability to my shit-stained underwear and shuffled off the playground and limped into the nurse's office and complained of some ailment.

[0:16:53.3] LW: Right. Made-up ailment, so you can go home.

[0:16:54.6] JK: Made-up ailment. Yeah, of course. She was like, “Oh, that headache must have made you shit your pants.” I was like, “No, it’s not that.” My mother was summoned and dutifully picked me up. I remember that walk of shame back across the playground with my backpack awkwardly slung low on my back, in attempt to camouflage this awful accident. Getting into the car with the last fading refrains of the American shot his pants.

That story became really emblematic of my childhood. Later in life, more recently as I've done some psychological excavation into my own life and trauma and psychosis, or what have you, there was this thirst to fit in when you're a child. It's hyperbolized, I think when you're a kid, because you've come out of the womb from a place of utter complete unity. Then your umbilical cord is severed and your life trudges slowly towards separation. All you want is that feeling of oneness and to be held and to belong, to be loved.

Off you go and life is beautiful and cruel. In my particular case, I just didn't have any friends, because we were moving so much. My only friends were my parents and they were all so busy. Really, that quest to fit in and really to assimilate was this huge part of growing up for me. I didn't have the tools to recognize the difference between fitting in and belonging.

[0:19:13.5] LW: You must have gotten good though, I imagine, at – because you could take that incident and you could literally put that on any playground in the world and you would have the same characters and you probably would get the same reaction from the kids. There would be the Babito character, whatever his name would be, depending on the culture you're in. You must have gotten really good at reading the landscape and knowing who the people were that you wanted to befriend first and who the bullies were and who the – the whole political dynamic of the neighborhood and of the school yard.

[0:19:50.1] JK: Oh, yes. They were the Jungian archetypes were recognizable quickly, particularly the shadow archetypes. The bully –

[0:20:00.7] LW: The outsiders.

[0:20:02.3] JK: Yeah, outsiders. Then of course, there's the nurturing nurse and all of the characters that make up this bigger play. I think that in retrospect, I did a lot. My life was very dominated by strategies to fit in. In some ways, to change who I was in order to feel a sense of acceptance. Also, not really knowing who I was, because was I Spanish? Was I Brazilian? Was I English? Was I American? I don't know what was my native language at that juncture. I didn't really have one.

I mean, I spoke Portuguese much better than I spoke English by the time we were in Brazil for three years. I think there was a questioning of identity. Obviously, now that I have, I suppose some more sophisticated tools to psychoanalyze myself, or do some personal inventory, part of me is very critical of my younger self, the self-loathing, always seeking the approval of others, defining myself through what other people thought of me. Part of me is like, why didn't you just have the self-esteem, the sense of your own identity not to care about that stuff?

Of course, you can't expect that as a child. I was just using the tools that I had as my survival mechanism. My tools were like, okay, I know how to be a chameleon. I know how to speak all these languages. Even just, this is a podcast so it doesn't lend itself perfectly to visual techniques, but you've seen me, just what I look like. I look like I could be almost from anywhere. Looks like my skin color completely belies my genetics. I'm 5 shades darker than anyone in my family. In a way, it's like, I somehow cultivated this persona or this ability to

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 7 ATEOTT 10 Transcript chameleonize myself to be almost anyone from anywhere, to the point where – and I don't want to skip over too much, because there's a lot of points along the way.

I remember when I was maybe 40 and I got into a cab with my daughters and I recognized on some subconscious level that the cab driver was Jamaican and immediately took on an accent of, “Take me uptown, man.” He's looking at me completely confused and somewhat pitifully. My kids are looking at me horrified and embarrassed. I'm examining myself of like, “Holy shit. I just take on the affect of anywhere that I am, because all I want to do is connect, all I want to do is fit in or belong.”

Again, I think in retrospect, it gave me very useful tools, because in the end of the day, my whole life, the common thread of my entire life has been about building community, about fostering community from my days in the music business, to Wanderlust to Commune. I think that these are in some ways, it's easy to look at character defects to be very self-critical. I am, and then I've also learned how to show myself some empathy and realize that often, we're just doing things, we're using and leveraging the tools we have to best survive.

[0:24:25.0] LW: When you look at your childhood as a one experience, how would you describe that experience in its totality in terms of mental health, or just the way – and I'm not talking about the adult Jeff looking back as a child, but as a child when you were actually maybe about to graduate from high school or whatever. How would you describe what you were about to leave behind when you were going to Columbia University?

[0:24:54.6] JK: Yeah. Well, there was an inflection point in my life that was noticeable in and of its time. Essentially, I carried around the persona of the fat kid for until I was 13. I had friends. I mean, I don't want to paint a big pity party on your show. I have friends and I was doing, playing tons of sports and doing well in school. I moved to Connecticut at its juncture after a whole bunch of other layovers, if you will. We went to DC and Miami. Then we put down some roots.

I was doing okay, but there was this – I was always essentially the fat kid, the fat friend, that was my persona in life, that was the character, the script that I had. I had friends that were

When I was 13, I developed this tumor on my knee and it turned out to be a malignant tumor. There's a whole long convoluted and complicated story around that piece of my life, but I ended up in the Pediatrics Ward at Sloan Kettering, which is a cancer hospital in New York; very well-known cancer hospital. I was 13, so I could have been put in an adult ward, I could have been in Pediatrics. Basically, I was just trying to find a bed to have this procedure as quickly as possible.

The bed that was available was in pediatrics and pediatrics of Sloan-Kettering is generally a one-way street. I had a fibrous history of cytoma. This was a relatively not particularly serious, relatively topical tumor. Yes, it could have metastasized. It could have gotten worse. In comparison to everybody else in that ward, I mean, we're talking terminal. We're talking eight-year-olds weighing 30 pounds with terminal leukemia stuff. I had a roommate during my tenure there who did pass away.

Coming out of the other side as I was literally wheeled out of Sloan, I was a new human. I suppose I became an adult. But I didn't really have a lot of self-awareness. I just realized on some level that I was lucky. I came home, there was quite a significant recuperation period at home. My parents decided that it was best for me to go away to boarding school. They were not satisfied with the level of education that I was getting at the public schools where we lived.

Of course, I fought this with every ounce of energy that I had, to the point where I think I smashed a few windows and they retreated and let me back in public school for a week, until I made my own decision to actually leave, which I did do. Through the process of the recuperation from my medical ordeal, I had lost a ton of weight, a ton of weight. I was now skinny person. I saw fat Jeff. That’s who I was. That's it.

I went away to this boarding school called Hotchkiss that was up in northwestern Connecticut; beautiful, incredible place. In the second week of school there, I mean, to be crass, I had all the hot girls all over me. I'm like, “What the fuck is going on? Why? Why me? I'm the fat guy.” My life totally changed around. In some ways that were scary and dangerous. I got into a fast

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 9 ATEOTT 10 Transcript scene with this international New York, jetsety, wealthy scene niche. I was for a couple years, the king of the world. It changed my whole outlook and my whole identity around myself. I became much more confident, just had a lot more self-esteem. That was a big inflection point

[0:30:25.9] LW: Talk a little bit about music, man. What was your experience of music when you were growing up?

[0:30:30.4] JK: Yeah. It was a major part of my life. My grandfather was a cardiologist and quit cardiology to become a gypsy violinist at around in his late 50s, which wasn't the most fiscally responsible decision. He was just passionate. I mean, just absolutely consumed with music. He'd play all day every day, any gig, didn't matter.

He played gypsy violin. It was highly emotional, bordering on schmaltzy, but technical and often instrumental. That was very influential to have a musician in the family. Then my dad was very talented just naturally. He never applied it to the development of all the technique, but I would say his spiritual well was deeper than its technical well. Music was around and on the weekends, my house was always and this was in Connecticut, so I was maybe 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, that age. My parents’ house was the epicenter for the neighborhood party scene. There was a lot of musicians in the neighborhood. On a regular Friday and Saturday night, folks just sitting around drinking beers, playing music. That was very, very normal.

Yeah. It was just around me. I suppose, my approach to learning languages was a musical approach, was a sonic approach. It wasn't a more pedagogic vocabulary approach. I was listening to sounds, processing sounds and connecting sounds to meaning. I wasn't studying and learning them out of a textbook. I think that that helped give me some a ability. I think it helped develop my ear.

Yeah, I was always playing, playing music in high school. Then in college, I got more serious about it and happy to talk more about that. Yeah, it was a very big part of my life. My brother became a professional musician. I ended up managing him for 12 or 13 years.

[0:32:59.7] LW: You ended up going to Columbia. That's where you met Schuyler, correct?

[0:33:03.0] JK: Yeah. We did. We met in freshman year. We were in the same dorm, which was McBain, which was I would call it the fringe accommodations at Columbia. Yeah, we met in art class. It sounds a little corny, but I had an epiphany in this art class about her. I don’t think I've ever talked about this, but we had a very, very straight-laced art history teacher that had this short gray bob and she was quite severe and angular.

I always wore fitted pantsuit and I was pretty much a stoner at that juncture. Those things did not mix well. I was always in the back of the classroom, avoiding her penetrating stare with every ounce of energy that I could muster. Schuyler was in that class and she was a dancer, a very serious dancer at that juncture. She would come in these tacky leotards and always late, because she must have had a class that could have bumped up against it, and sit adjacent to me and always pull out a grapefruit and peel it in class and peel back the layers and send grapefruit droplets out, until the world – I remember there was a Bernini sculpture, which I believe was the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, that would get – What was her name? Miss Maku or something. I don't know.

She would put these slides up and then she would talk about the piece of art on this big slide. Yeah, so she put this Bernini sculpture on. I remember correctly, this is an angel taking an arrow and holding it as if to penetrate the heart of St. Teresa, who's lying back in a state of spiritual ecstasy and epiphany. Yeah, I had this strange vision that I was this angel and I was abducting this young saint who was Schuyler. It was totally wacky.

[0:35:52.1] LW: You guys were dating at that time, I’m assuming.

[0:35:53.7] JK: No, no, no. This was before we we're dating. This was before we were dating. Then I became something like, infatuated with her through this vision and would sheepishly in my burnt, stoned way, trail her from a distance. I mean, not anything weird, but I was just enamored with her. She did not walk with her feet on the ground. She floated around. She was she was a Northern Californian transplant, grew up on a commune up in Sonoma County and had this hippie sophistication around her, that I was just completely enamored with and really pursued her.

In all humility, the all-you-can-eat buffet was amply stocked for me at that juncture, as far as potential female mates. But I just was not interested in Sydney from Sydney, or I remember Nurit, who was became this really wonderful park ranger. There was a marine biologist. Anyways, I was not interested in any of these beautiful, talented women. Schuyler was it for me. There was a long period of chivalry and pursuit that I engaged in; full of tribulations and whatnot.

Schuyler comes from a family, a relatively well-known family of strong, single women. She was not interested in a mate, getting married, having sex, none of these things were of interest to her. I suppose, I would categorize it as my longest and greatest conquest.

[0:38:14.7] LW: Were you thinking in terms of marriage at that time when you’re in college?

[0:38:17.9] JK: Well, it's funny. My parents actually went through a very, very disruptive divorce that lasted eight or nine years, to be honest and didn't finish until I was basically an adult. My brother and I ended up staying with my dad, which was pretty rare with that juncture. In retrospect, I'm not sure if I was looking for a girlfriend, or a mother, or some combination of both, but I certainly hurdled an unrealistic complement of archetype expectations on Schuyler, everything from be my mother, offering your nurturing breasts. Also, be a feminist breadwinner and also be my sexual partner. She in her amazing versatility and adeptness, somehow fulfilled all roles. Yeah. I could have gone the other direction of marriage, commitment. That stuff just doesn't work out. But I didn't. I went the other way. We've been together for 32 years.

[0:39:40.3] LW: Now we're in college, Jeff. You're no longer fat Jeff, you now are athletic, you're musical, you're smart, you're dating beautiful women, you may even get married to one day. What's your mental health state like at this point and what are you thinking about for career and your contribution to the world?

[0:40:00.9] JK: Not much. I was as I alluded to briefly when talking about art class, I was a full-on stoner at this juncture in my life. I was also making an income from it.

[0:40:22.9] LW: That’s a nice way to put it.

[0:40:24.1] JK: Yeah. Courtesy of the Columbia University football team, which if you remember back in those days, did not have stellar results. I might take some credit for that. Yeah, they bankrolled my interest in music. At this juncture, I became absolutely obsessed with the banjo. I played as much as I possibly could before class, in between class, after class. I became a DJ on WKCR, which was and remains actually a very, very respected and prominent college radio station in New York City at that juncture. It was transmitted off the top of the World Trade Center. That's no longer there.

It had a significant signal and it was known largely as a jazz station that had this incredible guy named Phil Shop, who ran the radio station and was a jazz aficionado like no other and wrote many of the liner notes for Columbia and for Columbia records actually and a lot for Miles Davis's records and knew every alternate take of everything.

He became a little bit of my mentor and then hooked me up with this show called Moonshine, which was a traditional American music show that aired every Sunday from 10:00 to 12:00. I was the DJ on that show. I put together a traditional American band, a bluegrass band, basically played bluegrass and old-time music. Then I met this guy, Bela Fleck, who became very, very influential. I followed him and got lessons from him, got lessons from his teacher named Tony Trischka. I just was absolutely consumed by music.

The radio station gave me just enough stipend to go on the road with an old school tape recorder and often with my band and with Schuyler, who did not show a lot of initial interest in bluegrass, but she definitely came around. We would go drive through the south, through North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and go to bluegrass festivals. Oftentimes, I booked my band as the first of 20. We would play at 8:30 in the morning while there was nobody there, but that got me backstage and I got an opportunity to interview all that first-generation bluegrass folks. Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, JD Crowe, Ralph Stanley, can't even believe those names, right? Boy. I mean, what a crazy culture.

[0:43:25.8] LW: Let’s hit pause for just a second, all right. I want to understand when this is all happening. Are you still at Columbia when this is happening? Or is this post-graduation?

[0:43:35.1] JK: Yeah. This is still at Columbia. I'm a student at Columbia, but really, my main interest is not being particularly academic.

[0:43:45.5] LW: Columbia is not exactly a community college, right? You have to have some academic skills to get into Columbia in the first place. I'm assuming the course load, it's got to be somewhat demanding. You're obsessed with the banjo, you're dealing drugs on the side, you're with this woman, you stone her in these art classes. Who are your biggest supporters at this point? Was your granddad still around, the gypsy violinist? Or who's outside of your mentors in the music world, who among your family and friends and the people that were around you, who was saying, “Hey, Jeff. This is where you –” Or were you having to not tell a lot of people about what you were doing, because you knew that they were going to disapprove?

[0:44:33.8] JK: Yeah. I didn't have a tremendous amount of – There was not a lot of discipline in my life, or I would say, there's not a lot of disciplinarian. No one played that disciplinarian role. My dad at this point, after my parents got divorced, was holding down a pretty prestigious job, but also rocking party central at the house. I would roll out there with tons of friends and we had this whole crazy au pair community. It was pretty raucous.

At Columbia, I joined a fraternity, which was hardly qualified as a fraternity since it was co-ed, mostly women. But we had a house. It was Delta Phi. Schuyler joined in too and there was a ritual around joining that was absolutely insane. It's called The Odyssey, but it’s a whole other podcast probably. It became a music frat. The president of the frat was this guy named Dave Graham, who was Bill Graham's son. Bill Graham was a legendary promoter in the Bay Area, promoted Grateful Dead and Shepherds in their plane and tons of other stuff.

[0:45:51.5] LW: Not to be confused with Billy Graham, but go ahead.

[0:45:54.2] JK: That’s true. It’s very different guys. Dave started basically the East Coast version the Bill Graham's Bill Graham presents in our frat house. It was called Music Unlimited. We turned the basement into a rehearsal recording studio and started signing bands. A lot of New York local bands, this one called Dream Speak, one called Willard Mon, one called Blues Traveler, which you probably heard of. One called The Spin Doctors, which you’ve probably

th heard of too. My band and we took over this little club called The 7/12 Club up on 125 Street. We were booking that.

Then in the summers, Dave and all the frat guys would work for the dead. Working parking lot, security. For me, it was pretty unbelievable opportunity to dive headfirst into my passion that was music, but also be driving a golf cart around the dead parking lot. It's pretty cool. Then Bill died in a helicopter crash, he and his girlfriend at the time, which was my drummer’s mother. That just sent everything upside down and everything collapsed. That music, all those guys, Dave Melody, Adam Schneider, all these guys that were older that were the senior guys in Delta Phi. They became my music business, I don't know, I wouldn't call it mentors, but they're we were making shit happen basically, at a pretty young age. From the academic perspective, Columbia was I mean, yeah, it's an Ivy League school, but it has a very particular curriculum called the core curriculum. It’s very, very humanities-based.

To be honest, I had learned out all that stuff already in high school. My high school experience from an academic perspective was thorough and intense. I mean, I was at boarding school wearing a coat and tie, going to chapel, going to class on Saturdays. It was intense. It basically just carried me till today. I wasn't top of my class or anything like that, but I was doing fine phoning it in, but my passion and my interest was elsewhere.

[0:48:48.8] LW: When you were going on the bluegrass tour with Schuyler, that was your first time really practicing being a manager, because I'm assuming you were making all the bookings for your band?

[0:49:01.4] JK: Yeah, I was making the bookings, writing a lot of the tunes, organizing the recordings.

[0:49:07.4] LW: You’re doing everything.

[0:49:08.8] JK: Yeah, I do. Yeah, I did the freaking cover art.

[0:49:13.6] LW: What program did you use to do the cover art? Art my fix?

[0:49:17.2] JK: To be honest, back then, I think I hand drew it. This might even be pre-Kinkos, but then printed it out in a copy shop and cut it out. I mean, it's old-school. It was cassettes. That's the deal. I was always like that. Schuyler and I started a guacamole business briefly, but we did a bulk deal with Fairway, which was a market on the upper west side to get avocados in bulk. I loved making guacamole. That was my big thing through in high school, through college was guacamole .

Yeah, we would make guacamole, packaged it up and we'd bring it to the festivals. We were selling other things too. There was guacamole – it was right out of teaching [inaudible 0:50:12.8]. It was guacamole front. Then you pull up the secret compartment in the cooler and underneath, you had your quarter ounces and your 8 ounces and things like that. That was it. It's just hustling.

Then my band got a little bit of traction. I was the dude, like 1:00 at the wetlands people filing out. I would be the dude with the flyers. Like, “Here you go. Come and see my band, come see my show. Here you go, flyers.” Yeah, I was always hustling like that. I never really asked for a lot of help. I was like, okay, we're going to make a flyer. I’ll make a flyer. Oh, I got to get them distributed, oh, I'll just distribute them. Oh, I got to get a gig. I'll just book the gig. Oh, I got to make the record. Oh, fuck it. I'll just buy the gear on eBay. That was it. I started a recording studio right when eBay first launched. I bought all the gear, ADAT, and I started a recording studio in 1995, something like that.

[0:51:25.0] LW: In your apartment in New York?

[0:51:27.5] JK: No. I found a proper recording studio right by the World Trade Center, two blocks north. There was this kooky business. I graduated from college, I went to go work for RCA Records for a little while. That's when you could actually make a lot of money in the music industry. I had a real job and I saved some money. It was cool. I never really wanted to work for the man, if you will.

I rented this little spot that was associated with this business called The Off Wall Street Jam, which was basically a live studio where guys that worked on Wall Street would come in with a giant fosters or two at 5:00 and they'd play rock and roll covers, Lay Down Sally all night. Just

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 16 ATEOTT 10 Transcript business dudes getting their rocks off and getting hammered. That was five to eight, five and nine. Otherwise, the studio was not being used. I did a deal with a guy, Bill; crazy motherfucker. Oh, my God. To rent the use of the studio at all the other hours of the day.

Yeah, we did that and I built with Sean, who's my best friend, who also went to Columbia, who eventually started Wanderlust with, etc. I built a recording studio there, patched together a bunch of gear off eBay. I put an ad. I was a one-man show at that point. Sean was a lawyer. He didn't leave his law firm until later, but I just took out ads in the Village Voice and I was answering the phone and I was the engineer and there would be just people coming off the street. I produced probably a hundred hip hop demos. I had to learn everything. I had to make –

[0:53:28.8] LW: You were a hip-hop producer?

[0:53:31.2] JK: Well, I mean, I'm not Timba, but like –

[0:53:37.3] LW: You’d have a tough day.

[0:53:38.7] JK: Yeah. I mean, I was in the –

[0:53:39.3] LW: Because that was back in the day. That was during the Puff Daddy era back in the mid-90s in New York City.

[0:53:46.3] JK: Yeah, this was mid, late 90s. Yeah. I had my MPC2000 and that was it. That's where all the beats were made on that. I also could play instruments, so I could sample. I had my ASR. Yeah, I was sampling all myself and then I build this huge library of samples and beats and then cats would come in and all they'd have were rhymes written down in notebooks, but they didn't have the – most of the time, they didn’t even had the beat. I was just throwing together beats and engineering, producing, da, da, da and then burning a CD and they walk out with that. Most of those sessions, how that rolled, then it was like, we roll out of there 5:00, 6:00 in the morning every night. That was some crazy hustle for a bunch of those years.

[0:54:45.0] LW: Did any of those songs blow up?

[0:54:46.7] JK: No. I mean, not that I know of, but what happened was during that time, my brother, he was crashing at my place a lot. He’s like, “Yeah, I'm going to go see these cats. They're these two other brothers, they're living up in Woodstock. I need a place to crash and in any way for a couple days before I go to Boston.” I'm like, “All right. Well, cool. Let me know how it goes.” Then he called me, he went to Woodstock and played a couple – wrote some tunes with these guys and called me. It was like, this and is crazy. It's going to be incredible. I was like, “All right.” I decided I was going to manage them and sign them to what? I don't know at that point. Doesn't have anything. I was like, “I'm going to sign you guys.”

They came down and we recorded an album in the studio that I had that at that point was called Full Tilt Studios. That band was so live and we ended up around the world, selling about 250,000 records which was – it's not a Taylor Swift, but for me, that was a significant deal over time. That just broke me into – it actually made me decide whether I was going to be a musician, or whether I was going to be in the music business. At that juncture, I'd said, “Okay, I'm just going to – I can't be mediocre at both. I'm going to go into the music business,” and then I ended up starting to do distribution deals around the world and signing more artists and building a cool, little indie management company and record label, and with managing all sorts of different acts and had all of our bands all over festivals and putting tours together and making records and did a big deal with Starbucks, which was in and of its time a big deal for us. Yeah, really, I managed my –

[0:56:51.6] LW: Was that the one where you – where Starbucks was selling music for the first time and doing compilations and stuff like that?

[0:56:58.7] JK: Yeah, exactly. The record business as digital, became more prevalent, started to get shaky. Starbucks emerged as a very prominent and influential player for retailing CDs, because Tower Records started closing, Virgin megastores started closing, CD sales were all down. Starbucks did two records. They did Norah Jones, the first Norah Jones record and then the Ray Charles record with Concorde. They would put him there right by the register, right where you checked out and they would play the music in the overhead speakers. It was just

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 18 ATEOTT 10 Transcript impulse buys. They were just cranking records. I mean, they were selling huge amounts of those records. It was a particular vein. It was for that –

[0:57:57.8] LW: Just coffee shop music.

[0:57:58.9] JK: Yeah, coffee shop music. They basically invented the genre of coffee shop music, but it was bougie, it wasn't too loud and intense or anything like that. I was in there and I was like, “Wow, this could be really a saving grace for selling records.” I had gotten a demo sent to me by a 13-year-old girl. We would get demos in all the time on cassettes. I got a demo from this 13-year-old girl. Most of the time, you wouldn't even listen to them. For some reason, I popped it in and I was like, “Oh, my God.” This girl, not even woman, this girl had this voice of an angel and she was writing songs at 13.

I went out to see her. She was from Western Mass and she was playing gigs at this little place called Club Helsinki, which at that point was in Great Barrington. It moved to Hudson. It was a very reputable club, small, but they always had cool, really high-quality artists playing there. I went to go see her show and she had a band. She was 13. She was giggly and goofy. Once she played and in started singing, it was remarkable. I hung out after with her and her mom. I said, “Hey, I know you write some songs. What's up?” She took out three or four notebooks just full of songs. I was like, “Oh, my God.”

In the very first time I met her in the back of my mind, I was like, “Oh, my God. This should be in Starbucks.” Of course, there was thousand people in music industry saying at the back of their minds. I did. I signed that girl. Her name was Sonya Kitchell. She became a very, very, very good friend. I produced this record of hers. I wrote a lot of the string parts and I was so involved in it and produced really just a beautiful record. I gave her all the credit. They were all her songs.

I knew one person at Starbucks, not even in the music department, but I weaved my way slowly through the labyrinth of a very big company till I finally found this one guy, Bill Corry who then introduced me to this other woman named Brenda Walker and who was coming to New York and I met her at the W Hotel. I was like, “You just got to listen to this. I know that this – it's just perfect for Starbucks.” We did it. We did the biggest independent deal that had ever been

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 19 ATEOTT 10 Transcript done with Starbucks up to that time, around this discovery artist. Yeah, they stocked hundreds of thousands of those records for us. That was yeah, that's a – it’s a beautiful.

[1:00:56.4] LW: That was bigger than soul life was then for you.

[1:01:00.5] JK: Yeah, it was the next building block. Yeah, it was significant and really solidified the company's well-being for a while, because it was dodgy. I think more than anything, it was almost like an acknowledgment. It was a recognition of like, yeah, you guys are doing good work and the world deserves to hear it.

[1:01:41.0] LW: Talk about 9/11. You said you were two blocks north of the tower, so what was that experience like for you?

[1:01:49.0] JK: It was intense. I mean, we would go up on the roof, because our studio was on the top floor. It wasn't a very tall building. Maybe four or five stories, but we could go on the roof and do what musicians do on roofs, which is not redrew so. That's what I'm doing now. We would look at the World Trade Center, we would look at the twin towers. In order to look at them, we would literally have to crane our necks all the way back and look straight up. We would often wonder. We'd be like, “God. Man if those things that were fell over. Whoa!” Yeah, we were real close.

Yeah, all that stuff happened. We actually ended up moving a block away before 9/11, but we were still right there, but we needed some more office space. Then 9/11 happened and we were in such the tight radius that we were not able to access our office for a number of months. I think maybe two or three weeks out, they gave us a little window to go in and collect some affairs. We got in the office in debris and dust had just been blown through the entire office space. It was super intense time to live in New York during that time.

I mean, in some ways an incredibly beautiful time, because there was this incredible sense of connection that emerged out of the collective grief that people were feeling. Not completely unlike now, but also very different, because you could be social with people. There was a lot of – people random acts of kindness and people high-fiving and hugging in the subways and on

It was really brought people together in a beautiful way for a while. These huge traumatic, oftentimes in these times of crisis and trauma inspires people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. In the aftermath of that, my wife decided – Schuyler decided to open a yoga studio right above me in the same building, because most of the people had vacated our building at that juncture, just because it was too intense. Yeah, so she opened Kula Yoga Project and opened the doors in early 2002, just right there out of the ashes of 9/11, right at ground zero.

[1:04:45.7] LW: Was she still selling guacamole up until that point? Or those are – what’s the ordeal?

[1:04:50.8] JK: No. We had graduated a little bit from some of the –

[1:04:55.5] LW: Shenanigans.

[1:04:56.8] JK: Yeah, wayward madcap shenanigans of our youth. She became a video editor for a little while and then, she comes from a relatively prolific acting family. She had been doing theater all of her life. Just prior to that, she had an agent and she got booked, not young and the restless. That was the other one. The famous one with the Erika sofa –

[1:05:23.2] LW: As the world turns?

[1:05:25.6] JK: Give me one more. It's the other really big one. I can't believe I can’t remember it.

[1:05:29.0] LW: Days of our lives?

[1:05:32.5] JK: Yeah, anyways. I'll remember in a moment. I was on ABC. She was on soap opera for a year and a half or something like that. She at first was like, “I'm never want to do this. I’m never going to do this.” She was like, “You're going to pay me.” “What?”

[1:05:46.8] LW: All my Children.

[1:05:48.0] JK: All my Children. Thank you very much. They gave her her own little mini apartment in that ABC building on Upper West Side and she was like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” She had a little run on All my Children. Then one day was reading her sides and discovered through reading her sides that she was going to be blown up in a boiler room accident on the show. That was it. Her character was written out, Daisy who was a very popular character had settled her contract dispute and was coming back on the show to be the main love interest. Schuyler was no longer needed and at that juncture, she decided like, “I'm never going to do this again. I'm not going to be at the whim of a casting agent, or a writer, or a contract. I just need to take control of my own life.”

She had been an avid yoga student and then had done a yoga teacher training. That had stemmed from way back when she was – she had been run over by a wayward hippie driving a VW bus. I was has back problems and had cured those largely with yoga. Yeah, right after 9/11, she opened Kula, which in Sanskrit means intentional community. I had a front-row seat to the power of that little, humble, funky yoga studio to really heal and transform people in a very hyperbolized situation.

A lot of people think of the financial district as largely just a business district, but it's actually quite significant residential district. Yeah, I just got to see firsthand, mostly women who had, were going through a tremendous amount of shock and trauma and grief come in to that little studio and sweat it out on the mat and then go into this tiny little lobby vestibule with a futon couch and just share and open up their hearts and be vulnerable and hug it out and cry it out and heal. Eventually, rediscover their spark and their creativity. I saw just that transformative power of yoga, but also community and that really bent the arc of my professional life going forward.

[1:08:33.2] LW: How was the extent of your yoga experience before she opened up her studio?

[1:08:39.4] JK: Very limited. It was not part of my experience growing up at all. My yoga experience was just through her. I was not a practitioner. I highly associated with the values of

© 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 22 ATEOTT 10 Transcript yoga, which at that juncture, I wasn't exactly clear what those were. For me, there seemed to be a component of progressiveness, of course non-violence and ahimsa, but I wasn’t really hip to exactly what that all was, or the tradition of that.

I resonated with this notion of okay, now these, the people that practice yoga tend to be progressive, they tend to value sustainability and they tend to value community, they tend to be non-discriminatory, like essentially all the things that I – all my socio-political beliefs seem to lay very squarely on top of that yoga community. I was like, okay, yeah. This is cool. I like this scene.

[1:09:41.5] LW: What was your satisfaction level with the music industry at that point?

[1:09:47.9] JK: A lot of this overlapped. The timelines really do overlap. As it got to be later in the 2000s, in the first decade of the 2000s, the music business was so tricky. I also started to feel a pull towards making a bigger impact with my life, devoting my energy and my time to what I would call now right work in action. I suppose at that point, just having a greater sense of meaning to my work. It took me a long time to figure out how to manifest that, to be honest, because Schuyler has – that studio instantiated in 2002, early 2002. I didn't start Wanderlust until 2008-2009.

It was a long gestation period of really understanding what I wanted to do. It wasn't until my late 30s that I somehow figured out how to align my passion with what I do every single day, day in and day out. Now I don't want to say that I didn't know I wasn't passionate about music, because I obviously was. I became so business focused. I don't mean to undermine music’s ability to create a lot of joy and help people, but I just found it more direct line later.

[1:11:33.6] LW: What was your mental state like at the time? Feeling pretty balanced?

[1:11:37.7] JK: Overall, yeah. Overall, yes. I always worked out a lot, so that really helped. I played a ton of basketball, like a ridiculous, almost to the point of absurd amount of basketball. That kept me fit and focused and present. I love basketball. I had a very unfortunate and sad ending with it.

[1:12:11.3] LW: I was going to say, every guy I know plays that much basketball in his 30s ends up pulling something, or tearing something at some point.

[1:12:20.3] JK: Yeah, yeah. I hung up my hi-tops once and for all. I went with one very specific incident. That was enough, because it was really unfortunately, it was disrupting my life in a way that was not acceptable from a physical capacity. That really helped me during that time. I will say, I was a bit of a zombie. I was just going through life’s to-do lists. I'd wake up, I was busy, I always filled my days with a tremendous amount of busyness. I was always at the bottom of my own priority list from a self-care perspective.

Basketball was great, but it wasn't exactly self-care per se. I was good, but I wasn't really focused on bettering myself. I don't think I read a book for 15 years. I got into that mode. I'm working all day and drinking coffee in the morning and drinking beers or wine in the night, then just grinding and working all day. That's it. I mean, I don't again, mean to really demean it, because I traveled all over the place. We were going to Asia. We were going to Japan all the time. I went to every festival in the United States, got to meet every musician. It was great on some level, but it wasn't enlightened. There was not an enlightened existence.

[1:14:00.4] LW: When did you realize that it was time to shift? What was that moment like?

[1:14:05.6] JK: Schuyler started leading retreats and mostly in Costa Rica. I became hip to her yoga community, the coolest scene because they were upstairs. Then I would start to tag along on some of these retreats and would fly into San Jose and then drive to some other random airport and take a Puddle Jumper to [inaudible 1:14:32.2] and then get in the back of a truck and bounce out on this road for an hour. Then there we were, like 30 people, mostly women in their late 20s, early 30s, waking up with the sun, meditating, surfing, doing yoga, making food, local food. I don’t know. It wasn’t really local food. It’s just the food that was growing there.

Then at night, telling stories and playing music and having a glass of wine. Basically, living the most inspired, connected life that you could lead. I was like, “Man, this is it. This is people really being in community, really caring for each other, having real conversations, being healthy. This is what life should be all about.” It's also in this far-flung rainforest on the Osa

Peninsula, just completely divorced from what is reality for most people. It's also there was an economic component to it that was interesting, but also exclusive, which was like, okay.

It's not like these women that were on these retreats were wealthy per se, but they were willing to essentially spend all their disposable income on this, on this experience and on this lifestyle, but not everybody could do that. I started really thinking about how I could alloy the experience I had from the music business, which was a lot of nuts and bolts of production and bringing product to market and look and feel and design and website functionality and ticketing and with the values and the practices of yoga and the associated modalities that I wasn't totally aware of at that juncture, but now I am. Really, the inspiration for the shift in my own personal life, but then also what became Wanderlust happened there in the in the bowels of the rainforest with the idea of like, “Well, geez. If I could put this experience closer to a major metropolitan center, but still somewhere beautiful and bring together a lot of incredible teachers, could I basic –”

I mean, it was pretty simple. It was like, could I make the world's biggest yoga retreat? Could I do 3,000 people, instead of 30? I wasn't afraid to build the stages on top of the mountains and put with sound and lights and all of that, because that was my reality. I knew that role. That's where that idea had it seed. Then there was a whole process of realizing and manifesting the seed of that idea.

[1:18:05.4] LW: Had you saved up money and you were going to invest your own money, or do you look for sponsors, or what was the next step for funding this journey?

[1:18:13.3] JK: We needed investors. Dude, I was so naïve. I'm not an MBA, obviously. At that juncture, I literally followed instinct and heart. That's it. I could barely function in Excel, let alone build a five-year pro forma, or a business plan, or any financial plan. I put together what I thought was the best little deck I could in PowerPoint and started going around and trying to raise some money. This was the fall of 2008. It's not the greatest time in the world to raise money. I think we raised the money three different times. Each time –

[1:19:04.0] LW: When you covered that swept up from underneath you every time.

[1:19:07.2] JK: Every time. Yeah. Even to the point where we were done. We were done. My community and people that I knew is in the music business, so that's where I went. We had Universal. They were done. They were in. We were good to go. We had had a million conference calls, a million meetings. They were a strange partner for the idea, and then we had had a couple other folks. We did eventually get investment in a strange rickety joint venture.

[1:19:37.9] LW: With Dave Matthews’ manager or something like that, right?

[1:19:41.0] JK: Yeah, yeah. With Coran Capshaw, who had funded Bonnaroo and outside lands and part owner in South by Southwest and South by Southwest. Anyways, and then the C3 guys that in Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza. We were well covered from a festival perspective. Those guys became our partners. It was quickly clear what we did was so different on some level culturally, from big stages with 60,000 people that largely based on Budweiser sales. It was great to have those partners and it got us off the ground. Man, it was a long strange trip from there, from launching one festival in Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe, California to 68 and 20 countries 10 years later.

[1:20:38.4] LW: When you first came to Sean with the idea after Costa Rica, was he on board right away? Did you have to convince him and sell him a little bit on the idea?

[1:20:47.3] JK: Yeah, there was some convincing for sure. He was my partner in the music business. We were already had been partners for a long time. He had come down to Costa Rica, so he understood. He got it. It was a little bit of convincing to completely pivot the business. The idea was not to completely pivot the business. We had every intention of continuing to run the record label in the management company and then just do Wanderlust on the side. Yeah, pretty quickly it became more than a side project. Then C3 ended up buying the management company. We got out in a way that was made it worthwhile and allowed us to focus all of our energy and efforts on building Wanderlust for better or worse.

[1:21:38.1] LW: What was the first experience in Squaw Valley like, in terms of your expectations? What was going on behind the scenes, versus what everyone saw on stage?

[1:21:53.5] JK: Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, for me, yoga, meditation, music, nature, sustainability, organics, biodynamic wine, that was all made a lot of sense to me, because that was essentially how I was living my life. That was just Schuyler and our lifestyle. This is often the case with me is that I just assumed that my lifestyle is pretty much everybody else's. I just took for granted the notion that all those things go together. When we went to market, it was like fucking crickets, man. We used to call it in the music business, the whale watch. I mean, there’s nothing like that.

[1:22:42.1] LW: The whale watch.

[1:22:43.7] JK: I mean, I've got so many stories about launching it. Basically, I was at th Bonnaroo, which was in June. It's June 10 , or something around there. Our first festival in 2009 at Squaw Valley was end of July. We probably sold maybe a hundred tickets, tops. I'm backstage with a bunch of my music industry guys. This guy named Matt Hickey, he was like, “So what's up? You sell any tickets?” I'm like, “No, man. Whale watch.” He's like, “This is what you got to do. You got to drive back to Nashville. You're going to fly back to New York. You're going to pack up your family and you're going to move to Lake Tahoe and you're going to get yourself a truck, or whatever, a station wagon and you're going to fill it with free tickets and you're going to fill it with posters and you're going to fill it with flyers and you're going to buy yourself a staple gun and you're going to get some rolls of tape and you are going to get a big map and you're going to put it on your wall and you're going to circle every town, every bar, every event, every farmers market, every beach. Every day, you're going to go out and you're going to explain what the fuck this thing is and you're going to hand people tickets for free. Anyone that makes any sense, radio station, DJs, bar managers, hotel managers, just give it away.”

I think this is exactly what I did. I went back to New York, packed up my family, got a Volvo station wagon and filled it up and my daughter, Phoebe, was super young at that point and she went out with me a lot. Every day, I just was – I was the most grassroots thing you could possibly imagine. I was there at the freaking 7-Eleven putting up posters, they'd get ripped down. Go back the next day, put them up. I was on the radio station every morning at 8 a.m. I mean, this is KTKE, which is – where the radio station was in the back of a barbecue joint.

I was there trying to explain yeah, yoga, music, nature. I got it at least that simple; yoga, music, nature. You get that? People are like, “Huh? What? Yoga and music and the nature? I don't get it.” I did that for 50 days or something. Then the night, Michael Franti who was our headliner and the night before his headlining show, first year festival, burst his appendix. I had to deal with that and somehow pulled Common out of my ass and Common flew out from Philly with his band and filled in.

[1:25:33.5] LW: How are you paying these guys if you only sold a 150 tickets?

[1:25:37.6] JK: Well, I mean, we were lucky to have investors that would essentially stand behind the risk. They absorbed some serious red in that first year, but they knew that game. They had launched plenty of festivals and festivals in their first year often lose money. We lost an impressive amount for the scale of the event. I had given away probably 2,500 tickets. It didn't feel bad. It felt pretty good. There was a critical mass of people there.

In year one, it was not the iteration – It was an iterative development for one or less. In year one, we basically ran a music festival with a yoga component. It was like, some considerable music names. As I was assessing that experience in that first year, I was like, “Okay, we got hosed financially,” and there was a lot of things to be concerned about. There was something interest happening. There was a glimmer of something, of magic dust, of fairy dust. That was this mashup of the DJs, with Sheeva Rae on a big stage, with a sound system and lights and people doing yoga and getting up and dancing and being in community together and being at one with the nature and then going off and doing hikes.

I mean, there was something new and fresh and interesting, because at that juncture, the only yoga gatherings that had exists were yoga journal conferences, which were in fluorescent carpeted Hyatts. That first year was very easy to recognize that okay, we need to focus the whole experience on this, on this yoga experience, this yoga lifestyle, all of the diaspora of what that was and what that meant. Then we from there, really honed it in and focused it in. Those first few years were so exciting. That's always the most exciting part when you’re building something from scratch and you see that there's some enthusiasm and energy around it.

You feel like you're innovating. Those first few years were really, really special. I think we were a big part of establishing a part of the culture. Also, really by the time we were done, cementing that lifestyle of all of those things actually going together, that all these things that seemed disparate, like green juice and yoga and nature and sustainability and all those things that I had mentioned before, that now those things are seen as part of an overall – a set of active choices that you can make as a bigger part of how you want to live your life. I think we played some part in helping to establish that.

[1:29:25.6] LW: We could obviously do a whole podcast just on your various Wanderlust stories and experiences. I'm sure a lot of those stories are already out there in podcast land. Tell me a little bit about, because you're in an interesting position now. You've actually transitioned away from the day-to-day operations of Wanderlust. The event has scaled down a bit in the recent couple of years. Looking back now at the body of work that is Wanderlust, what is the takeaway for you as now 50-year-old Jeff with all the life experiences from Babito, the playground, throughout the music industry and finding your own true north in this festival experience and into commune, which is what you're up to now? What is the takeaway from the Wanderlust body of work?

[1:30:18.1] JK: Well, I will say that I had a bit of a spiritual awakening, I suppose, towards the end of my operational role at Wanderlust, which has given me what I would say some good perspective on it. I think it's really important now, more than ever to build things at human scale. I think for many, many years at Wanderlust, I was so intoxicated by the potential growth that we were going to be part of leading this global cultural revolution around well-being and there was no limit to the amount of events that we would do. Over that time, all of a sudden, it's like a 100 plus employees, plus all of these partners all around the world, many of whom I didn't even know their names.

When I look at what it became, yes, it certainly became a much, much more commercial experience. I take full responsibility for that, because I led that part of the business. I'm the one that did all of the deals with Jody, with Toyota and Ford and Google and Adidas and all that stuff. In retrospect, I look at what made Wanderlust successful from a financial perspective and it was really those deals. As I think about it, why were those people so attracted to what we were doing?

Yeah, certainly, yeah, we represented, we were gatekeepers to a certain demographic that certain brands wanted access to. We were creating these sticky, memorable experiences that they could connect to. Really, it was more the language that we were using around growth and globalism and all of these notions of being big and bigger was better. How many more events are we going to have this year? Then the pressure that then that would put on staffing and sponsorship and grow and grow and grow and grow. Because we were coming from that mentality and often using that language and spending most of my time thinking about that, or flying to corporate headquarters around the world in order to generate enough money to be able to execute this and that and stuff like that, that is what you become.

In a way, the systems and structures that govern our lives, if they are devoid of the heart of I would call spiritual principles, then how are they supposed to serve spiritual beings? I think that that was my big learning is that scale and growth does not even remotely equate to success. That building systems and structures that are aligned with your highest principles, it's the best and most righteous work that you can do.

Building systems and structures at human scale to serve humans by humans, that is the most righteous work that you can do. Wayne Dyer, man, one piece of advice that I got from him was – and I didn't even realize what I was getting. Stay close to the work. Of course, what he was talking about was spiritual work. He travelled the world and did a ton of events, but he was never at the big dinners, or the social events. He was back in the hotel doing the work. That's what I think in my wide-eyed quest to grow, which to take it full circle, was not completely disconnected from my obsession with the approval of others with Babito and the other kids on that schoolyard, that I in many ways needed to feel a sense of ease and self-love. I needed to be recognized for doing something big by other people. In a way, I don't think that that was in the best interest of the company, or any company.

That's where I sit today with some degree of removal and just a larger toolkit is stay close to the work, stay close to the heart, build at human scale and then that's, I think in COVID-19, there's no better time to address corporate globalisms, systems and structures that have essentially turned human beings into transactional units that consistently define people by who they are and what they do and their resume and what they have, constantly make people feel

We have this opportunity now to take stock of our lives and reprioritize and reconnect with the things that made life worthwhile and precious and sacred. There’s a fantastic book the Charles Eisenstein wrote called Sacred Economics. He writes about sacred. What is the meaning of sacred? Sacred are things that are unique, that they are not standardized, or commodified in the name of operational efficiency that your grandmother made that dress, or – and in retrospect, I think about that with Wanderlust, the creativity that we were able to connect around when we had two festivals, were by the way, extremely profitable and transformational for people.

When we had two, boy could we make them unique, could we make them special, could we make them sacred? I just think we need that across everything that we do, whether it's a festival, or a loaf of bread.

[1:38:01.3] LW: I want to offer a reflection here, just hearing how you summarized the body of work that is Wanderlust. I still want to mention Commune and what that's about for you right down, but it reminds me the eternal struggle of Batman.

[1:38:17.4] JK: You’re going to tie that back. I love it.

[1:38:20.4] LW: Batman being this – and one of the things that I think makes him unique in the scheme of all the other superheroes is he was a regular guy. He didn't really have any superpowers. He wasn't born with any superpowers. He made a decision that, “I'm going to move in this direction and I'm going to help people who are helpless, who can't help themselves.” What I'm hearing from you is your purpose that you fell into is one-up, helping people find themselves, instead of some big villain, the obstacle that I think most people have, myself included, is buying into the social conditioning that more is better, bigger is better than success is equated with how much you have in the bank and how many connections and how much resources you have.

I think the ethos of Wanderlust, which is bringing people back to themselves is so important right now with everything that's happening with the pandemic. Because it's almost like we're being forced into that and forced to sit with ourselves. It's interesting that you through that experience, you went through the entire trajectory and that internal struggle between what is too much and what is not enough.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, but I've seen all the Batman movies and that's his struggle that he goes through. I'm not sure how conscious you were of that back when you were seven or eight-years-old. This is interesting to see how – I've done a lot of these interviews and I always start with childhood and your favorite activity and it's just interesting to see how those kinds of things, and maybe I'm stretching a little bit, I don't know, but it's interesting to see how they can line up, when we look at them from the broader lens of maturity and the wisdom that we get from our life experience. Does that resonate with you at all?

[1:40:15.9] JK: It does. I mean, A, I love the metaphor and I love the way that you've brought it back around in an interesting and coherent way. Certainly, yeah, I think that there is something around – I like the idea of yes, the average guy that can somehow put on a mask and a cape to make himself exceptional. What I think often is I tried to weave a thread through my entire life. What I often come back to, it's the notion of community and how desperately I sought it out when I was a kid and then how I subconsciously manifested that through my whole life of essentially putting people together in clubs and theaters and festivals, to Wanderlust, to Commune. That has been the thread, if I can identify anything.

There is this idea that I've thought about is you can have a band on stage at sound check and they might be playing the most brilliant music, but if there's no one there, it doesn't really resonate or mean anything. Four hours later, you pack that place full of a thousand people and that are experiencing something. That feeling when there is a musical crescendo and you look around the theater, or the club and everyone has that same rapt expression on their face and they're all feeling the same. It's as if they're not even themselves that they have transcended, they've become the music, they've transcended what generally defines our human reality space, time, location and form and they've become one another. They've transcended self.

Of course, that's at the core of every spiritual teaching. That has become what I have started to understand spirituality as being. It's recognizing. This interconnectivity. I suppose it's recognizing that we're all connected by a power that's greater than us. What better pursuit for your life than fostering that?

[1:43:02.3] LW: Talk a little bit about Commune and how that experience with Wanderlust is dovetailing into that and what are you doing differently?

[1:43:10.3] JK: Well, certainly the relationships that I was incredibly fortunate, that Wanderlust basically facilitated for me in every way over the course of a long time have been – I mean, that's been the Holy Grail for me, is being able to build friendships and relationships with people that have altered the course of my life, that have impacted me and others, people that I respect. Being able to build this broad, I guess portfolio of relationships with mostly with teachers and then find a way with a human-scale infrastructure to create a lot of impact with that.

That's really exciting. At the core, what we do is create online education, featuring top, respected teachers across spiritual and personal development, yoga and meditation, functional medicine, social impact. This business, I suppose it can create a lot of impact, but with a very human way. Yeah. I mean, I'm enjoying it a lot. I get to – I mean, like you, from hosting a podcast. That has been a fantastic experience for me, because it keeps me learning. Because every week for 94 weeks in a row, I'm interviewing someone who is not only smarter than me, but also has a particular expertise.

By extension, just out of fear of embarrassment, if nothing else, I have to push myself and challenge myself and read a tremendous amount and listen. That has been a fantastic growth opportunity for me personally.

[1:45:25.0] LW: I love it. Well, I definitely we’re going to include all of the Commune information in the show notes to the podcast.

I like to end the interview by asking the question, if someone were to come to you and say that they wanted to know start a movement in the way that you’ve started your movement, if you didn't have a whole lot of time to get into details, what advice would you give to them?

[1:45:59.2] JK: I mean, I suppose you have to move yourself before you move anyone else. I've been doing a lot of writing recently. If I'm not moved, if my heart doesn't leap while I'm writing, then that particular piece is bound for the dustbin. I would just always underscore the importance of really moving yourself before you try to move anyone else. I think that goes back to that notion of really staying close and honoring the work. From a business perspective, I think that also speaks to aligning your core mission with the profitability, or sustainability of your company. Just making sure that those things are completely overlapped, like at Commune, it's like, we wrote on the wall, we want to bring well-being to a billion people.

Guess what? If we do that, I bet that companies bottom lines are going to look pretty damn good. I always question when I see like, oh, yeah, Exxon Mobil has a sustainability mission. That anachronism doesn't work. Martin Luther King is not going to lead civil rights movement, while also running a used car facility or whatever. This is what the authentic life has become to mean for me, the life with integrity is aligning your works and actions with your highest principles, irrespective of external conditions. Just stick with that and be ready. Just do the work and be ready.

[1:47:55.3] LW: I love that.

[1:47:56.1] JK: Yeah.

[1:47:57.4] LW: Well, I want to acknowledge you, man, for your commitment to your mission and your generosity to the yoga community and the meditation and mindfulness community, for sharing your experience. You've made the world a better place. There are people out there right now who have, including myself, I've been to several Wanderlust festivals as you know. I got fond memories from those experiences. They're people, I'm sure who were at amazing concerts years and years ago and they have fond memories. There's some guy down in Florida who remembers getting this amazing guacamole one time at this bluegrass festival years and years ago.

[1:48:40.0] JK: I'll give you the first period. The last one, I'm not sure about. If you don't mind, I wanted to say one last thing, which is actually it's been so gratifying, is this over the last month and I mentioned this to you I think in a voice note. I've been doing quite a bit of writing and fortunately, we've built a very large database, so I get to circulate that out once a week on a Sunday. In the PostScript of that that goes out to I think about 850,000 people now. I offer frontline workers and anyone that has lost their employment due to COVID-19 free access to your meditation course.

[1:49:27.1] LW: Thank you.

[1:49:29.1] JK: I get probably 300 or 400 e-mails that go into a particular e-mail box every week. I answer every single one of them personally. That's I guess, I would call my Dharma or my commitment during this time of what I can do. Some people just e-mail me and say, “I lost my job. Can I have the meditation course?” I say, “Sure. I'll set you up and this is how it goes.” I would say one out of every three or four e-mails is a long personal story. Then I respond. I read them all and I respond and I get to gift them your work.

It's such a great gift to me to be able to do that. I have received so much gratitude from people. These are nurses, frontline workers, delivery people, other healthcare professionals, people on the supply chain, grocery store workers. I mean, it's heavy, heavy, heavy stories that I'm absorbing and that I get to alleviate with some meditation. I'm grateful to you for just being able to do that. I know how grateful those folks are for you as well.

[1:50:58.8] LW: Well, I was really impressed at the time when we shot that a couple of few years ago. We thought we were shooting it for Wanderlust TV, but turns out, we were shooting it to help people during a pandemic that was going to be happening three years later. We just didn't know it. Thanks so much for facilitating that and putting such great care into the production value of that, because I think it really does stand the test of time and it is one of the most – it's one of the offerings that I'm most proud of and I'm so happy when you announced that you were offering that to essential workers.

[1:51:35.5] JK: It’s been great.

[1:51:36.9] LW: Beautiful, man. Well, thank you.

[1:51:37.7] JK: All right, buddy. Yeah.

[1:51:38.8] LW: It's a great conversation. I think we got to everything for the most part. Have you and Babito connected over Facebook over the last 20 years? What ever happened with him?

[1:51:48.5] JK: He has not shown up, but I do plan to publish this little piece that I wrote about that experience. Maybe he will surface and we will break bread and make amends at some point.

[1:52:02.3] LW: Yeah, we got to do a where are they now addition to this podcast, so we know all the characters. Your grandfather, the gypsy, all these people. Anyways, yeah, thank you so much. If people want to reach out to you, or get a copy of that meditation course, what's the best way to contact you?

[1:52:20.8] JK: Yeah. My e-mail which is just [email protected]. [email protected] and it comes right into my Mac mail here. As you know, I respond to everyone.

[1:52:34.9] LW: Are you on Instagram much? On Twitter?

[1:52:37.3] JK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm on Instagram, @JeffKrasno. I will rant and rave on Instagram on a regular basis.

[1:52:48.3] LW: Awesome, man. Well, thank you again and I look forward to crossing paths with you very soon.

[1:52:52.8] JK: Yeah. We surely will.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[1:52:55.6] LW: Thank you for listening to my interview with Jeff Krasno. I'm so glad that he could join me to share his amazing story of perseverance and connection. I hope it inspired you to go out and find your North Star, that is what is the thing that makes your heart seeing, that thing that lights you up inside like a Christmas tree? If you want to hear more stories like Jeff's, subscribe to the podcast and check out the archive. I've got so many other amazing interviews with people who start at large and small movements, usually against all odds. I'm talking mental health challenges, financial challenges, physical challenges, pretty much any obstacle you can think of, somebody overcame it to start a movement. Usually, it was the obstacle itself that was the catalyst for the movement.

If you like what you hear, please rate the podcast. It really does help other listeners discover these inspirational stories. As always, you can find everything that Jeff and I discussed in the show notes, as well as a transcript of our interview below.

Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next week with a new conversation from The End of the Tunnel.

[END]